Posts by Gomez Adams

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Reminds me of when the guy who built our in-house project management PERT system left and the boss was casting around for someone who could take over looking after it. I joking commented that I had recently seen an Open University programme on the BBC2 about PERT and BANG! I got landed with the job - accidentally dropping the huge stack of punch cards that defined a project was the least of my worries.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Toast? What madness is this? Soldiers are not toasted.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

In this case it was driving between jobs so does count.

Presumably the Working Time Directive rules. Limited to ten hours a day if there is some driving involved.

You're wrong, I'm right, and you're hiding the data that proves it

Why did/do so many people endlessly download Unix binaries other than to check their connection is achieving the claimed speed by keeping it maxed out?

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

Could they not have just stuck it on the lamp post next to it rather than adding yet more unsightly street furniture?

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

The one time I was involved in a "loss" of audit trail records was when about 14,000 transactions appeared to be missing from the audit trail tapes and was detected by the end of day reconciliation runs (which showed they were doing their job). We investigated and found the missing transactions had been written beyond the EOT (end of tape) marker and so were being ignored. It was down to me to swiftly write a quick and dirty utility to retrieve said transactions and build a copy of the reel in question patching the missing transactions on the end plus rebuilding the directory reels to reflect the new tape numbers used (master and backup). Not the longest or hardest all nighter (it took a few hours to run the rebuild while I kipped under the desk) but one to remember.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Or power George Formby's electric banjo. :D

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Been having a similar problem with my aging laptop with the trackpad not working or working intermittently. Finally figured it out that resting the heel of my hands on the case next to the touchpad was causing the problem with a slight deflection of the case causing unintended signals in the touchpad.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Raising a support ticket that depends on you manually typing in an email address seems a bit flaky to me. Or have I forgotten how user unfriendly things were back then?

Watchdog calls for automatic braking to be standard in cars

No arguments against it? What about when driving happily along on with nothing in front of you and the sensor is triggered by a phantom fly or speck of dust and you get tail-ended by an HGV?

This happens regularly on our work vans - happily just the first bit and in this case all the seosor does is flash up a red warning light with a beep. I would *not* want it touching the brakes!

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

How the heck can someone drive an apparently identical car for 10/15 minutes without realising it was the wrong car?. As soon as I sit in my car after the garage has done some work on it I know this is not the car I left them with as the seat and steering wheel positions are not the same. It would be an extraordinary coincidence for the mechanic who worked on my car to be the same size and shape as me with the same driving position preferences.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Explain to me again why membrane buttons were ever considered a good idea? Got a perfectly functional microwave oven apart from the membrane pad being knackered. Made sure the replacement had proper physical buttons.

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Reminds me of an operator running some trainees through some basic commands on the console of our Sperry/Unisys mainframe. But of course not actually hitting Enter for those commands which could cause an issue. Finally he got round to showing them the command to reboot by keying in $! (Dollar-Bang), forgetting that this was the one command that did *not* need you to hit Enter for it to be actioned! :o

All of the norths are about to align over Britain

True North is where the heart is.

Amazon halts work on ‘Scout’ delivery-bot that delivered parcels no faster than humans

Re: I’m old fashioned

As well as having to deal with stairs there is also rough ground, overgrown shrubbery, badly parked cars blocking access and kids bikes a other toys scattered on the path up to the door.

Europe just might make it easier for people to sue for damage caused by AI tech

Presumably this will also apply to self-driving cars?

UK Info Commissioner slams use of WhatsApp by health officials during pandemic

The logical conclusion is for all officials to be wired 24/7 so that even that passing brief exchange in the corridors of power is recorded including "Do you take sugar with your coffee?"

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Re: Check you can complete before you start

I would assert that "THESE INSTRUCTIONS" is ambiguous as it could refer to just the instructions before the the start of the questions.More instructions after the questions start could be quite rightly construed to be not part the "THESE INSTRUCTIONS" referred to.

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

My knees have long gone past being happy to get up an flip sides every twenty minutes just for me to get annoyed when a favourite record has a scratch across it. :(

Worried about being replaced by a robot? Become a physicist

So they have a delivery driver down at 71%. If they mean they can get the goods delivered 71% of the way then they are way under what should be currently possible. However the difficult bit that I don't see automation being able to handle in the foreseeable future is moving the goods that last 1% of the way over rough ground, between badly parked vehicles, through stiff lobby doors, up tight twisty stairs to the customer's door. Not happening.

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

Could have done the changes then sat on them for the rest of the usual time up until the first panicky call from management while getting on with doing something useful ... or not useful. :)

Robot vacuum cleaner employed by Brit budget hotel chain Travelodge flees

Not quite the clean break it was hoping for. :(

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

What about 2028?

Have Unisys now totally expunged this issue from their OS1100/2200 systems?

The ideal sat-nav is one that stops the car, winds down the window, and asks directions

I called the lady on my old Garmin sat-nav Mona. :)

I always turn the volume down to zero when using any sat-nav these days.

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

As a delivery driver of many years experience 99% of the time the problem lies with the customer who fail to have adequately clear signage as to where they live. OK, if they live in a communal building then it may be down to the management company / housing trust / etc which have failed to sign which of several blocks is which or which is the entrance to particular flat numbers but in that case the residents should be complaining to them to get it sorted rather than moan about delivery drivers left wondering which mole hill is which.

BTW putting a house number on the side of the house or on an open gate neither of which is visible from the road is not a clever idea. Nor is allowing that bush in the garden to overgrow the house sign.

Finally, delivery instructions which say it is the house with the blue car on the drive is not much good if the car is not there or it is a dark evening on an unlit village road. Nor instructions which say it is the third house in the left but which do not say which direction that is coming from.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

A genuine IT professional would not click willy-nilly on a link on an unsolicited email.

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Garmin recognised motorcycle vibration as a problem with their sat-nav units a long, long time ago which is why they have a separate range of hardened devices for motorcycle use (Tom Tom were several years later to the partly).

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

If they allowed the humans to see the same mapping information being used by the bots they would be able to find the customer just as easily. And humans can negotiate rough ground, overgrown shrubbery and steps a lot more easily.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: HDMI CEC

CEC tends to cause more problems than it solves. I use a CEC killer HDMI adapter for all devices except my Chromecast dongle.

A decent universal remote is the one true way

Download the config from the internet for the devices you have and away you go.

I was so pleased with my Harmony that I got a second one as back up. :)

Words to strike fear into admins' hearts: One in five workers consider themselves 'digital experts' these days

So they really mean they are "expert users".

We used have a team in our IT department called End User Computing which the rest of us took as their mission statement rather than their name. :)

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Or the Dutch Tulip Mania. :/

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

I am gob-smacked that labellers are allowed to know what other labellers are identifying objects as while doing their job! :o

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

My own experience of something similar is much more mundane. Lent a USB charging cable to someone at an outdoor event who neglected to tell me they had dropped it in a puddle. Next thing I know the USB socket on my phone is borked! :(

Spent the next seven years using only wireless charging and Bluetooth or FTP file transfers until I eventually got a new phone last month.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

Where I worked if we had exhaustively (and exhaustingly) eliminated all possible other reasons for a one-off, irreproducible glitch then we wrote it off as a "neutrino hit on the computer processor". In other words we had managed to do something that none of the well thought out and designed experiments that have been running for many, many years had managed to do in detecting one of the little blighters! :)

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

My TV does not nag me about anything. But then I just use it as a TV and choose which channels and which programmes I want to use. If I don't like what I see I choose something else.

So I am unclear as what the OP's problem is? Is it the TV itself doing this to him or is it one or more of the (not so) "smart" apps that are installed?

Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways

The acid test will be if Homer can drive one of these safely.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

Surely checking for interference should have been done *before* spending loadsa money on replacing cables? Standard basic checking. Was this the kind of interference that can be detected by anyone using an AM radio?

Tesco self-service separates innocent Reg reader from beer after collapsing into heap of Windows dialog boxes

Look on the bright side: The smeary screen may be the result of being de-sanitised used a liquid cleaner which leaves a deposit as it dries.

These days I never use my fingertips on any public touch screen or keyboard but use a knuckle instead then use the de-sanitiser provided as I leave the store (use it on the way in to protect others from me and on the way out to protect me from others).

Oh crap: UK's digital overlords moot new rules to help telcos lay fibre in sewer pipes

Presumably this will be called a fatband connection? :)

Europe publishes draft rules for coronavirus contact-tracing app development, on a relaxed schedule

I look forward to installing the Windows Mobile 81 version of the app on my phone.

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

And then there is the 2028 problem on Sperry / Univac / Unisys mainframes as favoured by the US DoD due to the year being stored in a 6 bit field with Year Zero being 1964 - The TDATE$ issue.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Re: This theory always puzzles me

Having opened the can the tiniest amount the be prepared to wrap your lips round it while you open it a little more and use your mouth as a natural expansion chamber. :)

The Windows Phone keeps ringing but no one's home: Microsoft finally lets platform die

Still using my Lumia 820 with an Android tablet to hand to fill the app gap which mainly means Google Maps and BT Sport.

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Re: DIY

I use a Chromecast dongle for all my Smart-TV-itiy controlled from my Android tablet.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

At least when I replaced my Charge HR with a Charge 2 they seem to have fixed the strap skin allergy problem and provided a much more robust connection for the charger. Not had any of the sync / battery problems mentioned here though I am up to date. Tend to sync via the USB dongle plugged into my Windows 8 laptop rather than my Android tablet though need to use the latter to edit self-defined activities.

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Re: Not the trickiest problem in pubs these days...

I can't face anything brewed from Thames water.

One other rule that bar queuing needs to use: If I have wandered up to the bar for my third or fourth refill with my glass still half full to tide me over while waiting I am quite happy to give way to someone coming into the pub and are desperate for their first pint.

And what about bar flies who like to drink and chat at the bar rather than moving elsewhere after being served? Is the queuing system able to ignore them?

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

TBH Harry could have been a bit more tactful in telling the user that is what the spell checker does when it detects what it thinks is a wrongly spelt word.